Salim Barakat’s novel, Sages of Darkness: “Who is Benav’s son Bekas?”

Abstract

In his novel Sages of Darkness (Fuqahā’ al-Ẓalām), we encounter Salim Barakat as a writer of psychological realism, which this paper attempts to show by a comparison to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ground-breaking novel Crime and Punishment (1866). Barakat’s main protagonist is a Kurdish Sufi Mullah, a protector of his rural community in al-Qamishli, Jazira in Ottoman times. With the sudden appearance of “dried up fields,” Mullah Benav carries on with his undertone of murmured prayer and reliance on the techniques of Kurdish Sufi practice (somewhat similar to Jewish Kabbalistic practice) to solve the problem. And then, lo and behold, a fantastical event occurs with the birth of a baby son whom the Mullah calls “Bekas.” Sages of Darkness has five long chapters of approximately fifty pages each, comparable to the original serial publication of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. It introduces an aside on the psychological cause and result of child molestation by respected personages within the society and especially within the education system. The present paper uses quotations from the first fifty pages of Sages of Darkness. Long passages from the book are quoted because no English translation has as yet been published. I anticipate completing the translation in about 7 months.

Keywords

• Salim Barakat
• Dostoevsky
• Crime and Punishment
• Kurdish realism
• Kurdish Sufi Mullah
• Kurdish novel
• Sages of Darkness

References

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